Thomas Friedman reports, based on conversations with senior administration officials: “Privately, U.S. officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine’s leadership than they are letting on. There is deep mistrust between the White House and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky — considerably more than has been reported.”
Perhaps those conversations are now taking place to a degree previously unknown, but those in Kyiv have understood for several weeks now that President Biden is preparing to blame them if the war effort collapses. In fact, he already started to do so in June, as I reported at the time:
Senior Ukrainian officials believe that President Biden is ramping up an effort to fault Kyiv for failing to heed his pre-invasion warning about Russian war plans — and thus deflect from his administration’s own inability to deter the invasion, a former U.S. official who speaks regularly with top Ukrainian officials told National Review.
They’re furious about this new rhetorical tack, according to the source, because they believe that the White House declined to take meaningful action to deter the Russian assault in late 2021 and earlier this year…
During remarks at a Democratic fundraiser Friday in Los Angeles, Biden reportedly said that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky failed to listen to his warnings about the imminent Russian invasion. “Nothing like this has happened since World War II. I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating,” he said, according to an Associated Press report. “But I knew we had data to sustain” the prediction that Putin “was going to go in, off the border.” He added, “There was no doubt, and Zelensky didn’t want to hear it.”…
In an interview this week, the former U.S. government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that officials in Kyiv see Biden’s remarks as the “start of a process to lay blame on them.”
Earlier today, Jim Geraghty wrote that there are two possibilities: Either the Biden administration wants to pressure Zelensky to negotiate an end to the war, or that it is “preparing to use Zelensky as a scapegoat.”
The latter seems increasingly true, as the blame-laying process continues. The former possibility also cannot be dismissed outright.